Why Fake News Is So Darn Shareable and Facts Are So Hard to Believe
And how we as readers are part of the problem
“In the past, censorship worked by blocking the flow of information,” wrote author Yuval Noah Harari in Homo Deus. This is unsurprising. Historically, for any tyrannical regime to be successful, whether that’s American slavery or British colonization the world over, it had to block access to education and news from its oppressed.
“In the twenty-first century,” Harari writes, “censorship works by flooding people with irrelevant information.”
In the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election, a Gallup poll found that Americans’ overall trust in news was at its lowest since Gallup started the survey shortly after Watergate. “Fake news” was dominating minds and headlines.
Alex and Boris are fake names of fake newsmen who capitalized on this phenomenon. They copied articles that contained inflammatory and outright false information onto their own websites, changed the headlines, and set them loose on Facebook. As Alex told the Guardian, his “primary goal [was] to influence American policy, especially politics.” For Boris, it was just about money. According to a profile on Wired, Boris made $16,000 from just one of his false news websites in four months. The average worker in…
